Hi everyoneWell who would have thought finally I've got sound coming out of fluidsynth via USB midi. It's taken a lot of experimentation! I'm using DSL 3.3 and a Soundblaster with an Edirol UM-1EX midi interface.

To get fluidsynth working and accepting midi input, install alsa (go to Mydsl/System and select Alsa from the menu).

. Then edit this text file by opening this in the text editor beaver as superuser

nothing works. Why does the first one work ( i.e. -m oss which means use oss midi ) when the alsa one will not work? When you try the alsa one it just says 'failed to create midi thread no midi input' or something to that effect. Why is USB midi working over OSS? I'm not bothered so long as it works anyway but this is just to understand what is going on.

For newbies: if you open Emelfm as superuser and go to usr/bin/alsamixer - right clck over the file alsamixer and select 'Execute in Xterm' for the mixer to come up ( so you can at least put the levels of the mixer up).

Also you can open the program XMMS Audio/Mpeg and then go to Preferences and select 'Alsa' as the audio driver ( it was on OSS) - just so you can test that alsa works ok.

There are so many red herrings at times you have to be careful not to get into a muddle when testing things.

Now my last thing is to get Muse working with Alsa using Fluidsynth. Anyone care to have a go and help me out?

Thanks for all your help everyone ....it's so satisfying to play piano now